Karen Dempsey

I wanted it to be in service to the wider community.

That's the beauty of it.

All of that.

Community, tradition, the generational aspects, the like of the rosary.

I would very often hold ceremonies now where we would incorporate a rosary.

And it may be a person who has for a long time been away from the traditional faith path, hasn't attended mass within the institutional church, but they very much maintain those things.

what what does it for you spiritually stillness does it for me spiritually and nature being able to find my stillness and also being able to connect with people and i do that best from a place of stillness i think it's about being able to be with the most simple aspects of life

being able to be in my own company.

And my spiritual practice is challenging myself to see the best in other people.

And that can be deeply challenging or even not the best, challenging myself to see the good in people as well.

I'm very involved in activism and activism can be quite polarizing as well.

And I think in order for activism to really have the depth of purpose that it needs to have, we need to be able to hold polarities and we need to be able to find some kind of human connection so that we don't just write each other off and dismiss each other totally.

This was a really key part for me as well in creating Entheos because when I mentioned it being polarized between faith paths and no faith or no God, there were people in between who deeply have a deep faith in God.

but were not able to practice that within the faith path of their choice.

And I thought they were the people that I most wanted to create a space for because they were being the most underserved.

I had two women who came over from Scotland, one of my early ceremonies.

They were women of profoundly deep faith and they created their ceremony very much themselves because they knew all the aspects they wanted to incorporate and they were really devastated that they were unable to celebrate their union and their marriage and their love within the Catholic Church.

We also have survivors of institutional abuse, mothers and children from mother and baby homes and institutional homes.

I don't even like calling them mother and baby homes because they were so painful.

We've also just got the social witnessing of such deep and profound traumas and the generational impacts of that.